Jeremiah Quick (7 page)

The cage door slammed.

The lock clicked.

He squatted and looked in at her. "Do what I
say when I say it. Don't think about it. Don't wonder if you should
or shouldn't or if it's a good idea. Just do. And this thing we’re
doing will go just fine."

He left her.

He left her for hours and hours, for longer
than it took for her to need to pee, and then for longer than she
could hold it.

There was a heat
source somewhere, because she wasn’t cold, but there was no
comfortable position because the cage bars didn't allow for
comfort. She dozed for short periods, and dreamed, except it wasn’t
dreaming, it was remembering… remembering Jeremiah Quick, before,
and how she came to love him.

H
igh school was a
compilation of students from too many parts of the city. Jeremiah's
friend, Chill, was in a class with one of Pretty's girlfriends, and
she couldn't remember the hows or whys of the introductions, only
that they happened in the first few days.

Jeremiah was like no person she'd ever seen
before in her life.

He looked like, well, she didn't even have
anyone to compare him to. He was thin and stretched tall, all long
limbs, long black hair and brittle
fuck-you
eyes. He
listened to Bauhaus and the Sex Pistols, idolized Sid Vicious, who,
honestly, Pretty had never heard of. He was odd from head to toe,
really. His feet encased daily in knee-high, steel-toed boots,
black, that zipped up the back, twenty years before they would
become a mainstream fashion statement.

Only the misfits wore dramatic things like
that.

His leather jacket was the standard
motorcycle variety, heavy, purchased from a thrift store, and
supple after years of wear.

He'd customized it, adding a British flag to
the back, secured to the leather with silver safety pins and
riveted chrome spikes. A hundred or more of the spikes dotted the
jacket, covering the shoulders, sleeves, front and back of the
thing. If ever something screamed
keep your distance
, it was
that jacket.

It wasn't Goth back in nineteen-eighty-nine,
not in their conservative town. Nearest thing was punk underground.
It was – from what she gathered from Jeremiah – anarchist,
anti-Christian, political, and angry. At school, "punk" somehow
equaled "freak", and Jeremiah got hassled something fierce.
Punched, kicked, rolled into snowbanks. Often right in front of
other students. In front of Pretty.

Maybe Pretty should have been afraid of him,
but she wasn't. She was fascinated.

The urge to get close to him, the longing
for him to
see her
, was irresistible.

His friend Chill was... well. Chill was
different.

He was a quiet guy, soft-spoken, highly
intellectual, probably genius actually – and had, in an Egyptian
mourning ritual, shaved his eyebrows off. It was a
thing
, at
school, that earned him all kinds of derision and harassment,
although Pretty could never figure out
why
so many people
gave a fuck about Chill's eyebrows. Perhaps just because he was
weird – his olive green flak jacket, his lack of speech, his whole
persona a lurking sense of strange.

Later he would write her long, rambling
letters from college that she would read as fast as she could,
frantic for news of Jeremiah. She never knew Chill well, though,
and when the letters started sounding depressed, she stopped
replying.

There were things she didn't want to know or
take responsibility for. And yeah, how to save a life, and all
that, but even if it made her a total asshole, Chill drained her
emotional reserves, writing to her as if they'd shared some magic
moment by the bonfire… as if the feeling was mutual, when it
wasn't. And he'd never had any real news about Jeremiah.

She hoped he hadn't done anything awful.
She'd never looked for
him
. The fact that he was laying his
depressed shit on
her
, who didn't particularly even know
him, was a tremendous burden. There was a saying that that once
you've saved a life, you're responsible for that life forever.
Well, she didn't want any part of that, didn't want to earn Chill's
undying gratitude. The fact of the matter was that even though
Chill was always around,
he didn't talk
. So the most Pretty
knew of him was from his piteous, whining letters, and by then she
was too damaged to respond.

All she ever wanted from Chill was some
link, however weak, to Jeremiah.

Jeremiah's dyed-black hair went past his
shoulders and was, technically, a Mohawk, but Pretty didn't know
that until Halloween, when he spent his sleeping hours making it
stand up in eight inch spikes.

Pretty and her friends were shiny-faced
tenth graders, new to the school, while Jeremiah and Chill were
seniors. It might have given Pretty and Co. status, except Jeremiah
and Chill were outcasts.

They were so interesting it made Pretty want
to be an outcast, too.

When schedules got smoothed out, Pretty
didn't have a single friend who shared her lunch period. Except
Jeremiah.

So she offered him little rectangles of
chocolate, and he took them.

Bait.

Jeremiah was so polar opposite of every
other person in her whole world that Pretty couldn't stay away.
Even when he was mean to her.

"Why are you here?" he asked the first day,
baffled or irritated that she followed wherever he went.

"I don't know anyone else," she
answered.

"You don't know me, either."

"But I will," she'd said, ever the optimist,
although she understood his "ha" in response was not intended to be
funny.

In the mornings before school, and during
break time, he stayed as far away from her as he could, while still
behind the red smoking line. Red-liners, they were called, the
people with cigarettes, trapped behind the wide line painted on the
black pavement. It was laughable, but surely better than the
tobacco-free schools of now. Jeremiah's friend Chill made eyes at
one of Pretty's friends, and so in between his infatuation with
that girl, and Pretty's infatuation with Jeremiah, the group just…
kind of drifted around them.

Jeremiah didn't join Pretty's group of
friends so much as he was enfolded.

And Pretty didn't make friends with Jeremiah
so much as she forced him to be her friend. He wasn't always mean,
so there was something about her that he couldn’t stay away from
either, even if he wasn't about to admit it.

Pretty spent her lunch money on cigarettes
and bought Hershey bars from the vending machine for lunch. A peace
offering. Just one candy bar, for the two of them to share. She'd
open it and break up the rectangles, doling them out one piece at a
time, one for him, one for herself. Nothing so simple as halving
the damn thing at the outset, no, and she wasn't even sure why.
They ate the small pieces slowly, letting them melt away in their
mouths, maybe because it was easier than talking. Once in a while,
she'd break the last neat rectangle in half, offer it to him, and
they'd quibble over who should eat the larger of two tiny
pieces.

Every day, one Hershey bar.

Until the day she didn't bring one, because
she thought the candy bar didn't matter. Thought they were friends
without sweet treats.

His facial expression fell into sheer
disappointment, as if she'd ruined his birthday.

She never let it happen again.

She thought maybe he didn't eat lunch
because he couldn't afford lunch.

She tried to buy him food from the school
cafeteria, once, but he was angry or hurt or insulted and
disappeared for the rest of the day, so she never made that offer
again. But perhaps she
should
have brought him
sandwiches.

The bars of the cage press into her flesh,
and it makes her lie first on one side, then the other… but no
effort to get comfortable results in actual comfort.

Her skin remembers, has always remembered,
the feel of the spikes on his jacket pressing and poking into her.
November. Homecoming. Skip the game, skip the dance, get drunk in
someone's yard and walk to the victory bonfire.

She must've been at her most sparkly that
night, because her best friend's ex-boyfriend, who was so much
taller than her that the idea of dating him was ludicrous – asked
her out. Chill said she was pretty. Jeremiah kissed her.

It was the strangest night of her life.
She'd never before been the girl they all wanted.

She didn't remember the exact rules of the
game they played, kind of flashlight tag with a twist. Whoever was
"it" slammed a tumbler full of hard liquor and fled into the woods
behind the house. It wasn't a forest or anything, just green space
in the city, in the middle of a neighborhood with no real way to
get lost. The others would come crashing through the underbrush and
bushes, and the "it" person could surrender by taking a drink of
straight Peppermint Schnapps from a canteen, or keep running until
they were caught and physically subdued. Then the whole crew would
return to base and pick the next person to be "it." The girls were
outnumbered. It was... hide and seek with an exciting element of
possible date rape.

When Jeremiah was "it" he went into the
woods, and the rest counted to fifty and then were off, but Pretty
tripped and fell, and spent a few moments rubbing her ankle, so she
ended up behind everyone else, walking gingerly into the woods
alone.

Two steps into the woods, she heard his
hissing whisper: "Sunshine Girl..."

He was only a few feet away, standing behind
the weeps of a willow tree, the unlit cigarette at his lips bright
white in the dusk. "I'm supposed to subdue you," Pretty said, and
he made a weird noise, something between a cough and a laugh, and
took her hand. He led her around the tree, and out the other side,
to what pretended to be a proper trail, branches snapping and
grabbing at their clothing.

A small clearing, then, and somehow
Jeremiah's arm around her, pulling her to the ground, jerking her
brown bomber jacket off. A hand sliding under her shirt and over
her ribs. His weight heavy on top of her, the jacket spikes biting,
a hundred pressure-points dimpling the memory into her flesh.

She can taste the fall air in the memory,
the sharp but lovely smell of woodstove and bonfire. A Jeremiah
smell.

She remembers… his mouth against her lower
jaw, teeth pressing in firmly, testing, before his lips found hers,
his tongue surprisingly cool in her mouth.

Still remembers the awkward crush of the
thick leather between them, a feeling like claustrophobia, a moment
of pure physical discomfort and wanting to get away.

But his mouth – and those spikes – they were
delicious.

And before the kiss could be savored, there
was a crashing through the bushes, and flashlight beams spiking the
dark, and exclamations of
Hey! Are they really doing it?
Giggles and more crashing around.

"Quick!" He said (Yes, he really did say
that, but the comedy here is not unintentional). "Light a
cigarette. Everybody smokes after sex."

And then she and Jeremiah were giggling,
too, and running away from the flashlights, until they pushed
through a hedge-line and found themselves on a root-heaved
sidewalk.

And then they walked, choosing steps
carefully, the flat of a foot against a crooked angle of pavement,
stepping over roots and across cracks that had widened into
fissures that could turn an ankle. He took her hand as if to help
her balance.

They walked. Hands linked, fingers folded
together, companionable.

Pretty wondered if this was to be her next
thing, and knew her parents would flip right the fuck out. Like
Judd Nelson playing John Bender in the Breakfast Club and how
outstanding he would be for getting back at Claire's parents.
Jeremiah was so anti everything normal, and her folks were so
attached to the appearance of propriety… just the thought of the
three of them interacting made the hair on her arms stand up in
nervous anticipation.

Anyway.

They rounded the corner, and there was a
huge old oak tree grown up in the median between the sidewalk and
the street, and its massive, gnarled roots had burst through the
sidewalk.

Jeremiah sat down against the massive trunk,
hips cradled by those roots on either side. He pulled Pretty down,
maneuvered her so she was sitting between his outstretched legs,
and wrapped his arms around her belly, resting his chin in the
hollow between her neck and shoulder.

"There are three important people in my
life," he mused, rocking his chin a little bit, causing a flare of
nerves in the space just above her collar bone.

"One saved my life, and I will never be able
to repay her. Another holds my heart in his hands, and the moment I
find him, I will take it back, and punish him soundly for stealing
it. And then there's you, you with your bright light shining on all
my Dark, smiling at me like everything's going to be okay. I have
no idea where to fit you in."

The answer was, of course, that she wouldn't
fit in his world anymore than he fit into hers.

She knew it that night, but pretended not
to.

Instead she leaned her head back, his jacket
spikes poking hard into the back of her skull, and repeated to
herself what he'd said, the whole of it, over and over, until she
had the words memorized. They were the nicest words he'd ever said
to her. And then she asked, "Why do I have to fit? Why can't I just
be here?"

His sigh was almost aggravated. "How am I
supposed to know what to do with you? Should I be grateful you're
here? Or should I hide from your light? Or… should I fuck the shit
out of you to teach you to stay away from the Dark? Do you think
I'm safe, Sunshine? Do you really think you can love me and not be
ruined?"